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Chagos in a nutshell

The Chagos Islands - an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, halfway Africa and Indonesia. Colonised by French plantation operators, populated by slaves taken from other French island colonies in the Indian Ocean. In 1804 conquered by the British who abolished slavery. Plantations and workers however stayed.

And then the government of the United States of America decided that the archipelago was of high strategic value and wanted to have the natural harbour of the main island, Diego Garcia, as a navy base - condition was that there should be no human beings snooping around.

The islands were detached from the original main island colony, Mauritius, were not given independence and the British government decreed that the population of slave descendants was really an itinerant worker community.Plantations were nationalised and immediately closed down. The islanders were deported, the US navy and air force moved in (1973).

In the so-called war on terror the islands are used as a prison and torture camp under the incredible code name of Footprint of Freedom.

Although the indigenous people won their court cases against their deportation they are still being denied the right of return. Nowadays, the risk of climate change is the main story why the islands should not be populated.A continuing sad story.

Saturday, 19 January 2013

Prominent Labour politician Prescott pleads for Chagossians

The scandal of what happened to the ­people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean is a terrible injustice.
Imagine you lived on a paradise island. Your ­family could trace its roots back more than 200 years.

Life was good. Home was a four-bedroom house and nearly everyone had a job – unemployment was only 3 per cent.

But then, without warning, you were told everyone was being ­expelled – you’d been sold out ­because your country had done a deal with a foreign power to get a discount on an arms deal.

And just in case you resisted, more than 1,000 dogs were rounded up and gassed to death, the threat being it could happen to you if you didn’t leave.

So you were frightened into ­leaving and dumped on the ­dockside of a foreign land 1,000 miles away with no money and no home. You had to live in a slum, seven people ­sharing one room and ­treated as second-class citizens by the local population.

This actually happened. But it wasn’t an African dictatorship that did this.

It was British ­governments, and the people ­expelled were ­British subjects.